Lord Harrison: My Lords, is my noble friend aware of the enormous benefit to Lady Harrison of my daily perusal of the recipes in The Times and the Evening Standard, which I then make at the weekend? Does he share with me the concern that so often such recipes, de rigueur, add sugar to savoury dishes and pair salt with pepper? Is it not time that we turned our attention to that form of advertising salt and sugar, which might be eliminated from the diet?

Lord Grocott: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing on the Order Paper in the name of my noble friend Lord Bach.
	Moved, That the amendments for the Report stage be marshalled and considered in the following order: Clause 1 Schedule 1 Clauses 2 to 17 Schedule 2 Clauses 18 to 28 Schedule 3 Clauses 29 to 31 Schedule 4 Clauses 32 to 51 Schedule 5 Clause 52 Schedule 6 Clauses 53 to 78 Schedule 7 Clauses 79 to 85 Schedule 8 Clauses 86 and 87 Schedule 9 Clause 88 Schedule 10 Clauses 89 to 103 Schedules 11 and 12 Clauses 104 to 107.—(Lord Grocott.)

Baroness Andrews: My Lords, I wish I could be as short and as succinct as the noble Baroness. I appreciate, as she said, that this is a short Bill, but it has given rise to significant and very helpful debates. For that reason I am very grateful that we have had the opportunity to return to this matter at Third Reading. I am afraid that I shall have to reiterate some of the arguments I put in Committee and on Report about this amendment because it remains technically unworkable and, in effect, unnecessary. I believe that in concept it is unwanted not just by the Government—noble Lords would expect me to say that—but also by the noble Baroness's own party and by local councillors and taxpayers who, as a result, would find themselves with a council tax system that is tied for ever to increasingly out-of-date valuations with no legislative scope for reform.
	Again, I have to explain, as I did in Committee and on Report, why the amendment leaves us with an unworkable system. Two major flaws are at issue and I shall deal with each of them in turn. The first relates to the concept of a compiled list and what it means specifically as defined in the Local Government Finance Act 1992. The amendment is based on retaining that notion. The second flaw is the removal by this amendment of any mechanism for a specific date to be set for revaluation.
	Through this amendment, subsection (1A) of the Bill would read:
	"A new list must be compiled, in relation to billing authorities in England, on a date prior to the making of any order under section 5(4) and (4A) of this Act".
	The essential point is that "compilation" means in law the coming into force of the list. It is followed up by a very strict process and a timetable which attaches, not least, to the publicising of the list. That is the problem. In layman's terms, it means not simply that the Valuation Office would be required to revalue properties at the prevailing values at the time, without there being at that stage any changes to bandings, but that a new statutory valuation list must come into force for each billing authority in England before any changes can be made to the band values, to the number of bands or to the proportions across bands. The new compiled list would have legal force, and properties would have to be reascribed at their new values to the existing council tax bands, and council tax paid accordingly. That is what the law requires us to do.
	The effect would be disastrous. As I explained both in Committee and on Report, this would inevitably mean that the vast majority of properties would move up the bands, probably by more than one band, by the pure virtue of house price inflation. More than that, we would see a bunching of properties towards the top end of the scale, dramatically reducing the level of differentiation between properties of different values and people of different means. I know that noble Lords opposite are very concerned about that. Inevitably, it would build inequity into the system and would penalise many of our most vulnerable taxpayers.
	The logical sequence of the process should be revaluation to give us up-to-date values, reform informed by that and reflecting changes which in banding are necessary and fair, and then compilation, the coming into force of the list. Almost perversely, the amendment dictates revaluation, compilation and then reform and I am sure that is the opposite of what the noble Baroness intends. The technical effect of the amendment is perverse; compilation is surely the culmination of the process and not the mid-point.
	I remind the noble Baroness that on Report she said,
	"I believe that it would be short-sighted in the extreme to plan to have reforms as an afterthought to revaluation." [Official Report, 1/3/06; col. 264.]
	I agreed then and I agree again because reforms should not and cannot be an afterthought to revaluation. That is the situation that this amendment would predicate. It would require new, revalued lists to be compiled and bills to be issued to taxpayers, because the legislation says they must be, before any reforms could be implemented or, if I understand the intention behind the amendment, even contemplated. The noble Baroness went on to say that the amendment was,
	"intended to bring an order to [revaluation], starting with the basic value and proceeding to the banding and then to the issuing of bills." [Official Report, 1/3/06; col. 265.]
	That may be the intent, but it is not the effect.
	Let me now turn to the second, and very significant, technical drawback to the amendment, which is its removal of any provision to set a specific date for a future revaluation. The current drafting of new subsection (1A) reads:
	"A new list must be compiled, in relation to billing authorities in England, on 1 April in each year specified by order made by the Secretary of State."
	This amendment removes the concluding phrase,
	"specified by order made by the Secretary of State".
	As other parts of the Bill remove the previously planned revaluation date of April 2007 and the 10-year maximum cycle of revaluation after that, we are left with no mechanism through which any future revaluation can be initiated; and because of the link that the amendment makes between revaluation and reforms, there is no possibility of ever reforming the system in the very way that the intention behind the amendment envisages. So if we were to accept the amendment, far from bringing certainty to the process—we spent some time talking about the need for that in Committee and on Report—it would lock up the present system for ever, with no possibility of either revaluation or reform at any time in the future.
	Beyond those technical problems, why do I suggest that the amendment is unnecessary? I recognise the noble Baroness's true intent and what she is seeking to achieve. She said on Report :
	"The whole point of the amendment was to ensure that the council bands could not be changed between now and a revaluation, or unless a revaluation was proposed". [Official Report, 1/3/06; col. 264.]
	The idea is to ensure that revaluation and reform always go together as one package with reform being informed by a prior revaluation.
	I tried my hardest during that debate to reassure the noble Baroness that I cannot see that there would be a situation where the two would not go hand in glove. To revalue without reforms would lead to perverse changes in the balance of the system of the sort I have just described, and to reform without revaluation would be extremely difficult as the necessary information on which to make informed decisions would not be available. The amendment is unnecessary because it does not add anything useful. It takes away valuable flexibility in the system that may, in some unforeseen circumstance, be needed in the future.
	Finally, I also said that the amendment was unwanted; not just by the Government but by the noble Baroness's own party. In Committee, I quoted Mr Pickles, who was speaking from the Opposition Front Bench on Second Reading in the other place. He was espousing his party's belief that revaluation is unnecessary and that inequities in the system could be remedied, if need be, without revaluation. He said that matters relating to council tax banding and people's ability to pay, for example,
	"could be taken care of by adjusting the banding".—[Official Report, Commons, 7/11/05; col. 45.]
	I am afraid that this amendment directly contradicts, and renders unworkable, the policy which Mr Pickles described.
	I have repeated myself, and I hesitate to go on doing so, but I must stress once more that the Government have always been clear about the link that they see between reform and revaluation. It was expected that Sir Michael Lyons's work looking at reforms to local government finance would be fed into the 2007 revaluation.

Lord Bradshaw: My Lords, we turn to noise for the first few amendments. Amendment No. 1 would insert "shall" into new Section 38(1) of the Civil Aviation Act 1982 because large aerodrome operators should have a duty to monitor noise and to fix charges in respect of aircraft which exceed noise limits. Since we discussed this matter, I visited Birmingham airport, which has very good noise monitoring arrangements. It has devices that measure when aircraft deviate from flight-paths and it charges aircraft which do that. The money goes into a trust fund, which is distributed for the use of the local community.
	However, the airspace of Birmingham airport is shared with Coventry airport. Coventry airport does not have a noise regime. Noisy aircraft use Coventry. In that case—I am sure that there are other cases around the country—there is unfair competition. One airport says to operators, "You shall obey the noise regulations": another airport, sharing the same airspace and flying over the same towns, does not have such a regime. It, therefore, attracts older, noisier aircraft, with obviously detrimental effects on the living conditions of people who live there.
	Amendment No. 2, which is in my name and those of my noble friend Lord Mar and Kellie and the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, makes reference to the proportion of more "noise made by aircraft". This goes back to a point that I made in Grand Committee—noise does not rise proportionately. Noise is measured on a logarithmic scale, which means that it rises much more steeply than on a normal scale. An increase of a few decibels means a doubling of noise, whereas raising the fine from £100 to £200 is not necessarily proportional or the way to deal with the problem. That is also the purport of Amendment No. 5, which states:
	"Charges, in relation to noise, shall be proportional to the noise emitted".
	Under these small amendments, large-scale aerodrome operators must have a noise regime, which should contain penalty charges which are proportional to the noise emitted by aircraft. I beg to move.

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, the noble Baroness avoided the temptation to put words into my mouth but she predicted fairly accurately what I would say.
	Both with the previous amendment and with this one, I hope that noble Lords opposite are squaring these unfortunate attempts to increase regulation with the general drive to get rid of red tape and reduce regulation that we hear about so constantly from the Opposition Benches when they are on a free rein. However, when it comes to a specific area, they seek to gain support for their position by increasing regulation by the Secretary of State and government in a way we have never done and do not intend to do on this occasion.
	The Government use their powers under Section 78 of the Civil Aviation Act 1982 to set departure noise limits on aircraft taking off from the designated airports, Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted—as I mentioned in the previous debate—and those limits are already kept under review. It is our obligation to keep under review the impact of the number of flights on the ground and to bear in mind exactly what the noble Baroness says—that we need to keep up with modern technology and drive it towards providing quieter aircraft.
	Changes to those limits were last announced in December 2000—just over five years ago. A further review of departure noise limits was then carried out by the Environmental Research and Consultancy Department of the Civil Aviation Authority, overseen by the Department for Transport's Aircraft Noise Monitoring Advisory Committee, which includes representatives from the designated airports' independent consultative committees. This review was published in March 2003. I do not therefore believe that this amendment would make any difference to the Government's current practice in respect of keeping the departure noise limits under constant review, as, indeed, is the Secretary of State's duty.
	Amendment No. 4 also refers to the UK aviation industry's target, stated in its sustainable aviation strategy launched earlier this year, to reduce the perceived external noise of new aircraft by 50 per cent by 2020, as compared to 2000. The Government welcomed the release of the strategy, and very much hope that the industry will manage to meet it. But I do not believe that it is appropriate to make the Secretary of State responsible for policing a target adopted voluntarily by the industry, nor to give that target statutory force.
	The Government continue to press for improvements in aviation technology; reduction of noise at its source is one of the four strands of the ICAO "balanced approach" to dealing with aircraft noise. As aviation technology has improved, aircraft have become quieter. The noble Baroness referred to the improvements that Rolls-Royce is effecting. But older aircraft, though their environmental performance may not be as good as the most modern aircraft, meet ICAO technical standards, and remain part of airlines' fleets. The UK is obliged under its international agreements to allow these aircraft to continue to operate in the UK.
	There is a danger that the opposition amendments, which supposedly can be effected by unilateral action by the United Kingdom, are not mindful that air travel is bound by significant international obligations.
	Previous administrations and the present Government have accepted that it would not be compatible with the UK's international obligations to set a daytime noise limit so low that most of the large long-haul aircraft, certificated to ICAO standards and legally entitled to operate in the UK, would not be able to operate. Similarly, the night-time and shoulder period departure noise limits must be broadly compatible with the night-flying restrictions that we set under Section 78(3).

Baroness Hanham: My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply and the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis, for his intervention. The joy of being in Opposition is that you can move amendments and get matters discussed, and that is half the purpose of the job of the Opposition. Whether anyone agrees with the amendments, they are there to be shot down if necessary, or at least to extend the debate on certain matters.
	The amendment asked that the Government should take account of the target of reducing external noise and report on it from time to time. Maybe I was a bit long-winded by going through all the possibilities for new aircraft and the process and the technological improvements that there are likely to be. The amendment was asking the Government to take note of the targets and perhaps from time to time to tell Parliament how likely they thought those were to be achieved. We will discuss this more today. There is greater concern about the amount of aircraft noise, and I do not think that it behoves any of us to try to deny that. Increasingly more people are living under flight paths, and larger aircraft are in use. Whether the international and European bodies will it or not, perhaps Parliament should from time to time take note of the effect on people who live under the aircraft flying into its airports. That is really what the amendment was about. Since I do not think that I am winning, I beg leave to withdraw it.

Lord Hanningfield: My Lords, I must return once again to the highly controversial issue of night flights. The issue was debated at some length in Grand Committee, and despite the Minister's assurances I remain unconvinced of the necessity or the wisdom of the change in the present system proposed by Clause 2(2). As noble Lords are aware, aircraft night noise is currently controlled by the combined operation of a movements limit and a noise quota system. Amending Section 78(3)(b) of the Civil Aviation Act 1982 in this way would empower the Secretary of State to discontinue the association of limits on the number of night movements at Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and elsewhere.
	I must declare an interest as leader of Essex County Council and that Stansted airport is situated in that county. The removal of the movements limit and the reliance on the quota count system will have a devastating consequence for the millions of people who live under major airports' flight paths. The quota system is highly technical and is often incomprehensible to the people it is meant to protect. There is no official index for night noise in the UK. The noise limit is calculated by using Leq, or level equivalent, which is officially recognised during the day between 7 am and 11 pm. That fails to take account of the fact that noise has vastly different implications at night.
	Level equivalent is a measure of noise energy and is worked out by averaging the noise level over a 16-hour day and expressing that as a continuous level. Its shortcomings are illustrated by the fact that a single Concorde on departure has the equivalent noise energy of 120 Boeing 757s. Thus, a Boeing 757 departing every two minutes for four hours produces the same level equivalent as two minutes of Concorde, followed by three hours and 58 minutes of silence.
	Under the quota system, all aircraft are rated according to their noise on take-off and approach, and then banded into quota count categories that are three decibels apart on an exponential scale. A limit is then placed on the total number of points in a six-month season. I am explaining this in a technical way, because it is an important element of this issue. The fundamental conceptual flaw behind the way of regulating aircraft noise is the assumption that the degree of disturbance and/or annoyance caused by noise depends only on the level of the overall noise dose in terms of sound energy emitted.
	This method is perverse, because it fails to take any account at all of the importance of how many and how frequently flights are permitted. The same total noise exposure can be achieved with a few noisy aircraft or a larger number of less noisy ones. Furthermore, whether those aircraft are bunched together or spaced at long intervals during the night period does not make any difference to the noise dose. By removing the night movements limit, the implication is that as aircraft become less noisy, more flights can be accommodated within the same noise quota. Under the quota count system, one Boeing 747, rated as QC2, could be replaced with four Boeing 777s, rated as QC0.5.
	Less noise does not necessarily mean less disturbance. I repeat, less noise does not mean less disturbance. Consequently, the system is wholly inadequate for assessing the disruption of sleep caused by the impact of a relatively small number of noise events during the night. Cumulatively, those noise events may not break the noise quota, yet they may result in a person being disturbed on multiple occasions during the night.
	It is imperative that we retain the movements limit on night flights. It is not only effective, but is easily understood, transparent and open to validation. Importantly it provides protection for those people who live in close proximity to airports, but not necessarily under flight paths. It protects them from the associated problems of ground noise, which the quota system alone cannot properly address.

Lord Hanningfield: My Lords, I can absolutely assure the noble Lord that a future Conservative government will. I want to respond a little to the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis, in relation to something that the Minister said. Of course we believe in less regulation, but in things like noise and pollution emissions there has to be regulation. If we are to have the better environment that we all want, I am afraid that there has to be regulation to achieve that—and we have to have some different ideas and polices. Certainly, the Conservative Party under its current leader is determined to put some of those issues forward. I am putting forward some of them from the Front Bench today.
	In maintaining the movements limit, we do not inhibit any possible advantages to be gained from a noise quota system. Instead, we simply ensure against its significant disadvantages. As I have argued before, the two mechanisms must be seen as complementing each other. Together they provide the most effective protection for communities living near airports or under flight paths. I beg to move.

Lord Berkeley: My Lords, I want to ask my noble friend a question in relation to a comment that he made in Committee. I believe he said that these changes, if adopted, would not come in before 2012. He went on to say that,
	"the intention behind the Bill is to create the necessary flexibility to take account of new technology and changes to the position adopted by people in relation to night flying".—[Official Report, 5/12/05; col. GC 90.]
	I think that other noble Lords have made similar comments. There is grave suspicion about this. Why do we need to bring in legislation if it is not needed for six years? There is grave suspicion that "flexibility" means more flights, and I urge my noble friend to think again about this. Frankly, he could bring in regulations or even another Bill in five or six years' time, when there may be a lot more understanding of the effect of noise on people. I think that it is very premature to do this now.

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe: My Lords, I can see that the Government have a difficult balancing act here. Aviation is one of our growth industries and many jobs are involved in it, and, although we all want to be green, I do not think that people would be very happy if we saw substantial job losses. I can see why the Government want to ensure that we continue to maintain Heathrow, in particular, as our central hub. Many in Europe would be very pleased to get their hands on the flights that might be pushed their way if they could not go to Heathrow and they would be pleased to see job growth in their countries rather than in the UK. So I can see that a balance has to be struck.
	I also live under the flight path and am troubled by the noise early in the morning. I declare an interest in that I am a non-executive director of National Air Traffic Services. I have an interest in this subject and on a number of occasions have questioned why more flights appear to be coming in earlier these days than used to be the case. I am not sure on which side of the line we are in regard to the regulations.
	The point that has been put to me is that many incoming flights are not simply holiday flights; people are flying in on business and, in particular, they are flying in from the Far East. The one thing that I know from working within NATS is that, as soon as the aircraft get close to the UK, there is a dash to be first in line to get down on to the concrete. I have long argued that there is a case for greater international co-operation to ensure that planes fly at a slower speed across continents so that they come in on schedule, rather than arriving half an hour earlier than required and having to be stacked, with all the consequential problems that that involves.
	Are the Government initiating efforts to try to have greater co-operation along those lines to ensure that there are savings in fuel, by having people fly at slower speeds than they do currently? Pilots are given complete freedom to fly as fast as they wish as long as they arrive at the destination on time. Improvements could be made to avoid the growth of more flights arriving early in the morning. I warn the Government that this issue causes a great deal of angst among the public in west London. If they do not take note of it, people will suffer as a consequence. I want to see greater efforts made by the Government to avoid the foot-in-the-door scene and even greater growth in the number of flights coming in at night in the future. Until I have heard what the Minister says, I am unsure which way to vote.

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, I understand that, but I do not think that the British public necessarily look at the question of travel in quite these specific terms. My noble friend Lord Brooke identified that Heathrow night flights are largely business flights. In fact, the major night flights at Stansted are not leisure flights and those at Gatwick are freight. In both cases we are talking about economic considerations and not just, as the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, seemed to indicate, travellers bent on pleasure—and, in any case, their interests need to be taken into account.
	I want to emphasise that the Government are not about the business of changing the basis on which they carried out the consultation on night flights and the development of the legislation. I think it was suggested at one stage that there is nothing in the Bill of any advantage. The Bill is needed—and my noble friend Lord Berkeley wondered why we were legislating now—because, for the benefit of the nation, we need to increase the capacity for regulation on air travel. We need a Bill at this point to take account of what we all recognise is a rapidly changing situation.
	I emphasise to the House that we have listened to the representations in Committee. I cannot speak in very precise terms to my subsequent amendment without being out of order, but the House will recognise that the Government do not intend to operate these fresh provisions until 2012. That will be the burden of an amendment that I hope will commend itself to the House in due course.
	It is not fair for the House to suggest that the Government are not acting in good faith with regard to what we recognise is a very important issue. Of course I understand the anxiety expressed in all parts of the House about the problems for local residents, but a limit on movements alone would be a very blunt instrument of regulation. It certainly would not control the amount of noise at night, nor could it influence the types of aircraft used at night. The louder an individual aircraft is, on the whole the greater the likelihood is that it will disturb people. I know the other calculations—the frequency of the aircraft and how long they are above the area where the noise imprint is made. But noise quotas are set alongside the present movement limits to drive the use of the quietest aircraft available. Part of the Bill's purpose is to create this essential structure so that we are able to balance the needs of those requiring air travel against people who are entitled to a good night's sleep, free from disturbance on the ground.
	Setting a night restrictions regime by reference to noise alone could lead to an immense increase in the number of flights permitted, depending on how that limit was set. Equally, it could be open to the Secretary of State to use the powers available under Section 78 to set movement limits a great deal higher than their current level. In either case, the bone of contention would not be the powers themselves, but how Ministers used them. Of course it would be possible to apply for judicial review on how these powers had been exercised by Ministers. The Government intend to maintain strict controls on night flying and to set those controls by both limiting aircraft movements and a noise quota until such time as a different method is more appropriate. We have no view at this stage on how the criteria could readily be improved.
	I have previously suggested that it would be possible to make an effective night regime which controlled noise by a noise quota alone. The quota would be set at such a level that the quietest planes available must be used to enable the number of night flights to remain the same as previously. Noise quotas can be an effective limiting factor because, in themselves, they set a ceiling on the number of flights. As the noble Baroness emphasised in debating the previous amendment, they also provide an incentive for airlines to use the quietest aircraft available. One argument that stakeholders have made in favour of movements limits and against setting night restrictions by reference to overall noise caused is the idea that it is each individual incident of an aircraft flying overhead that disturbs someone, rather than the cumulative noise over a period of time.
	Our research suggests that reaction to noise is subjective. It varies greatly. Despite extensive research, there are still differing views among both those who suffer noise and the scientific community about whether a single loud noise event or the accumulation of smaller noise events creates a greater disturbance. Research has suggested that the incidence of sleep disturbance is especially associated with the loudest noise events—in particular, those that produce more than 90 decibels.
	The night noise criteria that we have proposed as part of the consultation—which we are honouring—on night-flying restrictions at Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted airports relates to the 90 decibel footprint of the noisiest aircraft currently operating at each airport. Such noise insulation is intended to mitigate the impact of each flight, as do the noise quota limits, by encouraging the use of quieter aircraft.
	I digress from the question of noise because I want the House to recognise, as I am sure that every noble Lord does, that this is a complex and difficult area in which to regulate. The idea that it is easy to impose a blanket ban without severe consequences for both those who wish to travel and, if I may say so, the economic contribution made by the whole industry of airlines and airports to our economy is wrong. We cannot take the matter lightly. I seek to demonstrate that the Government take a balanced approach to controlling and mitigating the noise impacts of night flying at Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted. We do not seek to use the flexible powers immediately, nor do we believe that any future government would use them unreasonably when they are brought into force in due course. If they used them unreasonably, the Government, through the Secretary of State, would be subject to legal challenge.
	However, the Government remain convinced that it is right to amend current legislation in this way. We are doing so after and in line with full consultation. The consultation involved all those interests identified today as necessary to the consideration of the issues. Once again, I emphasise that there is no intention on the part of the Government to introduce any fresh regulation before 2012, but that is the subject of a later amendment. I hope that the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment.

Baroness Hanham: My Lords, in moving Amendment No. 10, I shall speak also to Amendment No. 13. Managing the impact of airport operations, in particular the question of aircraft noise, has been at the heart of much of the debate during the passage of this Bill so far, and today has been no exception. I recognise that reconciling the needs of national and local interests is complicated, as the Minister has pointed out. However, effective management of the impact of aviation on local communities is essential to maintaining the quality of life and confidence of those living in close proximity to airports. A fundamental part of managing successfully this complex interaction is ensuring the inclusion within the process of those communities most affected.
	The Bill has been criticised for its propensity to allow airport operators too much power and local people too little. In particular I remain astonished by the licence it gives airport managers to establish and operate noise and mitigation schemes. At all UK airports except Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted, the airport operator is responsible for deciding what the appropriate noise levels are and then monitoring and reporting on them, in effect enabling the airport operator to act as policeman, jury and judge. Even in the case of the designated airports, despite the overarching responsibility of the Department for Transport for ensuring compliance, the actual monitoring is conducted in-house by agents of the airport operator. Consequently there is considerable mistrust among local communities in relation to the fairness, objectivity and transparency of these in-house arrangements for reporting on aircraft noise and emissions, and for the recording and handling of complaints from members of the public regarding aircraft noise and other environmental impacts.
	It is no wonder that people feel frustrated and angry. In effect they are rendered powerless. The Minister referred in Committee to the existence of airport consultative committees. However, the reality is that beyond providing the facilities for consultation, the airport operator is under no legal obligation to act on or doing anything about what is consulted on. The Minister has assured us that all is not as permissive as it might seem. In Grand Committee he highlighted the vast swathes of international and European law that determine the noise levels considered acceptable. The House already knows our thoughts on whether these noise levels are actually acceptable, but that is another debate. Most important, the Minister confirmed that:
	"Where there are problems, efforts should certainly be made to resolve them at the local level if at all possible. This is the best level at which both to monitor and to call attention to the issues that arise. Local monitoring is best".—[Official Report, 5/12/05; col. GC 76.]
	This amendment is in complete accord with the Government's thinking. It seeks to strengthen the role of local communities and address their frustration and powerlessness by granting local authorities a role in monitoring and auditing the noise impact of both designated and non-designated airports. In the interests of public perception and trust, it is important that these types of initiatives are enforced with robust checks and balances to identify issues arising and to deal with them accordingly.
	The proposals on noise management set out in the Bill, and the existing noise regime applicable to designated airports, identify airports as the authority best placed to manage policing and monitoring functions day-in and day-out. It is crucial that, in addition to national regulations, the potential role of the local community, which is best placed to react to local noise impact, is not overlooked. Existing arrangements at designated airports include local mechanisms such as a consultative committee and informal arrangements for periodic review, as at Stansted airport, by the local authority of the airport's flight evaluation unit. It is important for effectiveness and public trust that the interface between the airport and the local community is at a more satisfactory level. I beg to move.

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for the way in which she moved her amendment. She said that her thinking was in complete accord with the Government's—not quite, but it is a good try. If we keep working at it, I am sure that we will get unity of purpose.
	Spending from designated airports' penalty schemes and non-designated airports' noise controls schemes is meant to fund projects that could add to the quality of life for the community around the airport. In making these provisions, the Bill reflects existing practice on the part of designated airports and the practice of some non-designated airports in making community donations. Where these arrangements exist, it is common to find that a community trust fund has been established to administer the grant payments, with local authorities and representatives of the airport's consultative committee generally included as trustees. It is also common practice for the consultative committee to be informed about the operation of the scheme. We think that this is a better model than the one put forward by the noble Baroness.
	The noble Baroness will note my reference to local authorities, and I know how keenly she admires and advocates their role in our national life. The problem with airport consultative committees is that a burden would be imposed on them that it is not appropriate for them to undertake: specifically, the requirement in each of these amendments that the consultative committee should consent to payments made under a penalty scheme. Airport consultative committees are just that—consultative. They are not decision-making bodies, and given the wide range of interests that are represented on them, it would perhaps be unreasonable to expect them always to reach a consensus on airports' use of penalty funds.
	The presence of members of an airport's consultative committee on a charitable trust set up to distribute payments received for breaches of noise controls is a different matter. If the trust has been set up for that express purpose, it becomes a decision-making body. We believe that, in practice, airports will continue to consult appropriately on the distribution of penalty scheme funds, including seeking advice from and providing information to the consultative committee, where one exists. We do not believe that it is necessary to put this requirement in the Bill, and nor do we think that that is necessarily the best way to act.

Baroness Crawley: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for moving his amendment so persuasively. However, it will not come as a shock to him that I am going to have to reject his amendment.
	The greater part of England and Wales is covered by what is termed "controlled airspace". This contains a complex, multi-layered network of routes and airways established over many years to provide a safe and efficient flow of traffic to and from airports from ground level to the designated international UK airspace exit and entry points, as the noble Lord will know.
	There are a number of factors that have to be taken into account when designing airspace. Safety of design is paramount—and we have discussed that at previous stages. I am sure we are all agreed that that must be right. Fly-ability, complexity, air traffic controller workload, and environmental matters all are considered as well. However, government policy does not preclude over-flight of national parks or areas of outstanding natural beauty, as it is often impractical to do so.
	We understand the concern that noble Lords have expressed about protecting designated areas of the countryside from the noise and visual intrusion effects of over-flying aircraft, although the aircraft noise levels will be relatively low. Section 70 of the Transport Act 2000 sets out the Civil Aviation Authority's general duties when exercising its air navigation functions, and specifies how any conflict in the application of these provisions is to be resolved. Section 70(1) makes it clear that the safe provision of air traffic services is the overriding consideration. The authority must also consider secondary issues, such as efficient use of airspace, the interests of stakeholders, environmental matters and, of course, national security objectives. In doing so, if there is a conflict in applying these considerations, the authority must apply them in the manner that it thinks is reasonable.
	The Secretary of State has given directions to the authority, under Section 66(1) of the 2000 Act, in respect of all United Kingdom airspace. These are concerned with, among other things, the environmental impact of air operations, and require the authority to perform its air navigation functions in the manner that it thinks best calculated to take into account the need to reduce, control and mitigate as far as possible the environmental impacts of civil aircraft operations, and in particular the annoyance and disturbance caused to the general public arising from aircraft noise and vibration, and emissions from aircraft engines. They also require the authority to take into account the need for environmental impacts to be considered from the earliest possible stages of planning, designing, and revising airspace procedures and arrangements.
	Where proposed changes to the design or provision of airspace arrangements or to the use made of them might have a significant detrimental effect on the environment, the authority must notify the Secretary of State of the likely impact and of plans to keep that impact to a minimum. Where those changes might have a significant effect on the level or distribution of noise and emissions in the vicinity of a civil aerodrome, they must also ensure that the manager of the aerodrome, its users, any local authority in the neighbourhood of the aerodrome and other organisations representing the interests of persons in the locality have been consulted.
	The Secretary of State has provided guidance to the authority under Section 70 of the Transport Act on environmental objectives to be taken into account when carrying out its air navigation functions. The guidance states that changes to airspace arrangements should be made after consultation only where it is clear that an overall environmental benefit will accrue, and where airspace management considerations and the overriding need for safety allow for no practical alternative. The guidance specifically notes that overflight of national parks or areas of outstanding natural beauty is not precluded. Given the sheer area that they cover, as the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, will know—these AONBs and national parks cover about a quarter of England and Wales—I do not see how it could be otherwise that the guidance specifically notes that overflight of national parks is not precluded.
	The guidance does say, however, that the authority's director of airspace policy should, where practical, pursue policies that will help to preserve the tranquillity of the countryside. I hope the noble Lord will see that there is direction and guidance to ensure that the policies do try to preserve the tranquillity of the countryside where that does not increase significantly the environmental burdens on congested areas. As he will know, that is in line with the Government's aim of giving stronger protection to the most valued landscapes in designated natural parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty. However, given the geographical constraints of the UK, the location of centres of population, the complex nature of the national traffic service route structure and its interrelationship with adjacent states and the associated international route structure, as well as the military training and danger areas, there is very little scope for air traffic to avoid specific areas on the ground.
	In the en route phase of flight—that is, the phase outside terminal airspace—any decision to introduce deviations in routes to avoid specific areas such as the national parks, as this amendment would require, would not be an option. It would require significant additional airspace to control flight profiles, and controller workload to manage such airspace would be significantly increased, leading to reductions in capacity and some safety concerns. From an environmental perspective, the impact of avoiding areas such as the national parks would be greater because aircraft would have to change power settings and configuration to fly less straightforward routes, leading to increased fuel burn and associated emissions.
	Where it is possible to avoid overflight of national parks and AONBs below 7,000 feet without adding to those environmental burdens on more densely populated areas, it clearly makes sense—and I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw—to do so. We want that to be on record. However, government policy will continue to focus on minimising overflight of more densely populated areas below this altitude. In accordance with long established government policy on national parks, we will continue to give priority to minimising the impact of aircraft noise on as many people as possible. We believe that would strike the right balance, which is what we are looking for.
	I hope that explanation of the reasoning behind the Government's policy, which has been that of successive governments, will convince the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, and that he will withdraw the amendment.

Lord Smith of Leigh: My Lords, first, I declare interests as director of Manchester Airport Group and leader of Wigan Council. I share the noble Baroness' views that as representatives of local communities, local authorities should play a key role in the monitoring of noise around airports; but I question the necessity for this amendment, because local authorities have existing powers to play a full part in those areas if they wish to do so—particularly regarding the role of environmental health officers. One of their roles is to monitor noise at all points within a local authority area, where they believe it contributes to a nuisance to local people. Clearly that is the case in relation to this issue.
	Local authorities, if they are smart, can also use the planning laws, particularly if there are plans to extend an airport—they can use Section 106 of those laws to reach agreements with airports to ensure that they can cement the relationship and have access to the airport monitoring information to make sure that they are being effective.
	The amendment also does not seem fully to take into account that airports are part of their local communities and, therefore, wish to co-operate with local authorities to make sure that airport noise monitoring is effective. That is the whole purpose of the earlier clause and I do not believe that the power provided in the amendment is necessary. Certainly, in relation to airports with which I am involved—Manchester, Nottingham and East Midlands—local authorities play a full part in the monitoring processes and we have an open-door access policy to ensure that local authorities have all the information that the airport has about noise, which they can use in any way that they wish.

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken, particularly those on the Back Benches who have brought some sanity to the Front Benches when they get confused about which amendment we are discussing. My noble friend Lord Smith is well-qualified to have identified the role of local authorities in relation to airports.
	As he rightly said, local authorities have a role when an airport applies for planning permission in respect of developments that it wishes to undertake, where it is not of sufficient strategic importance for the Secretary of State to call it in. They have power, in such a case, to make planning permission subject to conditions, as the Secretary of State has done in imposing a cap on the number of movements at Heathrow as a condition for the construction of Terminal 5. It is also possible for airports voluntarily to enter binding agreements with a local authority. Gatwick airport did exactly that with West Sussex County Council, when it undertook in 1979 not to construct a second runway before 2019. That agreement with a local authority was of the greatest strategic significance.
	Local authorities also have a statutory right to be included in the consultative arrangements made by airports designated under Section 35 of the 1982 Act, so they will have an opportunity formally to make their views known to the airport management. There is nothing to stop local authorities from carrying out whatever noise monitoring they might wish to—which was the burden of my noble friend Lord Smith's remarks—to inform their dealings with the airport in the context of their planning powers, consultative committee membership, or any other bilateral discussions.
	Along with all other stakeholders, local authorities will also be able to make their views on airports' noise control policies and procedures known, through the mandatory public consultation. There is the additional point that I was seeking to respond to when I thought the noble Baroness was speaking to the previous amendment—namely, that local authorities may wish to play their part in a trust that deals with payments for noise and emissions, to the benefit of the local community.
	I was at one with the noble Baroness that local authorities have a proper part to play in respect of airports, but they have those opportunities and powers under existing legislation and the amendment is quite unnecessary.

Lord Tyler: My Lords, the issues to which the noble Countess, Lady Mar, has referred represent not just a betrayal of the interests of air crews and airline passengers but a disaster waiting to happen. With the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis, I co-signed her amendment and new schedule relating to the role and responsibilities of the CAA and the need to establish a much more robust system to monitor risks and health threats and insist on remedial action. It is time that we had that action.
	Let me illustrate the severity of the problem. Last week, I received answers to a series of parliamentary Questions about the recent in-flight incidents in which BALPA, the pilots' association, had reported to me that there had been evidence of air contamination in the cockpit or passenger area. As previously there has been serious illness—both acute and chronic—among air crews, I take those very seriously.
	Of the seven incidents involving the aircraft BAe 146, the Minister replied that in five cases the CAA,
	"has no record of a contaminated air incident".—[ Official Report, 1/3/06; col. WA 55.]
	Why not? What is so extraordinary is that I had asked about a previous incident involving a Boeing 757 and was told that the CAA had no record. Subsequently, the department and the CAA had to be reminded of that by BALPA and the Minister had to admit that,
	"that was unfortunately not reported to the CAA at the time by the airline due to an administrative oversight . . . We remain satisfied with the effectiveness of this system because it enables both airlines and crews separately to report incidents to the independent regulator".—[ Official Report, 16/2/06; cols. WA 87-88.]
	The Government may be reassured by that, but no one else is—certainly not those in the industry. As was so well explained in the excellent examination of this issue in the Observer on 26 February, even the most experienced officers and air crews are reluctant to report incidents. Some reasons for that have been given by the noble Countess. Self-regulation and monitoring by airlines, let alone by manufacturers, is woefully inadequate.
	In that exposé in the Observer, several pilots whose careers had been ended when they reported illness consequent on incidents of that kind explained why. Anthony Barnett, the paper's investigations editor, spoke also to Captain B,
	"an experienced passenger jet pilot",
	who said that,
	"he is scared that if he gives any clue to his identity he will be sacked".
	Those are not new problems. They have been on the Government's desk for six years to my certain knowledge. I was first alerted to them in December 1999, when I received an alarming report from Sweden that stated that on 12 November of that year an unidentified toxic gas had almost caused catastrophe in a BAe 146 aircraft operated by Braathens Malmo Aviation. In the subsequent debate in the other place, I explained what happened. I stated:
	"On the first part of a three-part trip, the cabin attendants felt strange and experienced incredible pressure. One attendant described the experience as like a 'moonwalk.' On the second leg, the discomfort returned, and the two pilots experienced it too. On the third leg, to Sturrup airport, the cabin manager realised that something was seriously wrong, went forward to the cockpit before landing and found that both pilots were wearing their oxygen masks. The captain was so near to blackout, in his words:
	'feeling dizzy and groggy despite the oxygen that he had instructed the first officer to take over the controls and land the plane'".—[Official Report, Commons, 28/6/00; col. 206WH.]
	Ministerial replies then and thereafter were constantly reassuring—and misleading. Self-regulation has proved dangerously inadequate. Frankly, I do not trust aircraft, engine or lubricant manufacturers, let alone the airlines, to undertake the necessary monitoring, testing and remedial action required for this continuing, very dangerous problem. The potential poachers cannot fulfil the role of effective, independent gamekeepers. The scale of the risk requires a far more robust and independent approach.
	As I previously pointed out, the BAe 146 aircraft, which has so often been affected by incidents in Australia and on the continent as well as here in the UK, is still used by the Queen's Flight. Prince Philip and Princess Anne are both reported to have complained in 2000 of unpleasant fumes on flights in such aircraft. Indeed, Members of your Lordships' House may well have flown in an official capacity in a BAe 146 and may be able to add to that sorry saga.
	Representatives of pilots and air crews have prepared an 18-page dossier for submission to the chairman of the CAA on those issues. I trust that the Minister will take very seriously the collapse of confidence among responsible airline staff in the reporting regime and the consequent examination of risky incident and air causes.
	I hope that the Minister will respond positively to the amendments tabled by the noble Countess. I also hope that our future exchanges will produce more informative answers. In the mean time, I have six very quick questions for him.
	First, he has already referred to the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. I was a Member of the other place when that Act was passed. It is quite clear that it does not apply to an aircraft in flight. Which government agency or department has full responsibility for the health and safety of airline passengers once the aircraft has left the ground and UK territory? Has that body undertaken any research or obtained medical feedback from passengers after an air contamination incident in the aircraft has been reported?
	The CAA research report on the issue stated:
	"Although some references are made concerning long-term health effects, the scope of this research did not include an attempt to determine the extent of any such risk".
	Why, then, did the Aviation Health Working Group claim that there is no evidence to,
	"suggest that there is a health risk to passengers, including infants, or crew"?
	Next, how do the CAA and the Minister define the difference between incapacity of a pilot or aircrew and reduced efficiency? Next, even BAe and the lubricant manufacturers now admit that there is a potentially serious problem. Why is the research study undertaken under the auspices of BAe being kept secret? BALPA figures show that only about half of reported incidents of that sort reached the CAA—probably representing less than 5 per cent of the total that actually occur. Surely the Government must act to deal with that growing discrepancy.
	As I mentioned earlier, one parliamentary Question that I tabled referred to the air contamination incident on Boeing 757 G-BIKI on 9 November 1998. The Minister told me that the CAA had no record of that incident, but then had to confess to an error in the system. That was no minor incident. The mandatory occurrence report was entitled, "Toxic Fumes in the Flightdeck". The captain who filed the MOR was subsequently retired due to ill health by his airline, but the CAA has never even heard about it. What better evidence of failure can there be?
	In the interests of safety and good health for pilots, cabin staff and passengers, we need a radical change and we need it now. I should like to be reassured by the Minister that he and his team have read the full report from the conference at Imperial College last April on contaminated air protection. That is what the amendments address. The issues are urgent. I hope that we will get action now.

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have participated in the debate, but especially to the noble Countess, Lady Mar, who has pursued the issue with her customary diligence. I have also been grateful for her willingness to discuss these matters with me outside the Chamber, so that I could develop a full understanding of them. Whether that leads me to giving a more constructive answer, the House and she will have to judge, but I have certainly very much appreciated how she has presented the issues and her proposed solution to them.
	I also greatly respect the campaign conducted by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, both in this place and in the other place before he arrived here, on the issue. It goes without saying that the Government recognise that these are issues of the greatest importance for the industry. We are certainly concerned about any possible threat to the health of crews and passengers. That involves people's general health and what may occur to them after their careers as a crew have been completed, or to passengers who leave aircraft and subsequently feel ill; but the most important concern must be the ability of flight crew to guarantee the safety of the aircraft, because failures on that front could, as noble Lords have said, have catastrophic effects.
	We do not think that the proposed new clause is the way forward. The Civil Aviation Authority and its aviation health unit carry out many of the functions proposed for the new organisation. I respect the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, and the noble Countess, Lady Mar, about past failures of the Civil Aviation Authority in relation to one or two incidents. There have not been many, but any incidents are too many in these circumstances. As a result of the last discussion on this issue, the department has brought home to the Civil Aviation Authority the necessity of ensuring exactly what the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, seeks—namely, effective recording—because it is not right for the Civil Aviation Authority, which is concerned with the welfare and health of those on flights, not to have an effective record of when things have gone wrong or to indicate how it responds.
	This Bill places a general duty on Her Majesty's Government to organise, carry out and encourage measures for safeguarding the health of persons on board aircraft. If this not unique in the world, it certainly puts the UK Government among the leaders in promoting aviation health. We take this responsibility seriously, and we are aided in our concern by the issues identified by the noble Countess and the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, in their contributions, and by my noble friend Lord Clinton-Davis from his specific perspective.
	It goes without saying that the Government would not want air passengers or crew to be exposed to serious health risks. The issue at hand is establishing whether and to what extent any such risks exist in cabin air. The Government are not aware of this being the case, and until there is convincing evidence to the contrary, we find it difficult to justify the significant cost which the centre proposed in the amendment would impose on taxpayers. No reference has been made to the Committee on Science and Technology. It considered this issue and said:
	"The absence of confirmed cases of tri-ortho-cresyl phosphate (TOCP) poisoning from cabin air and the very low levels of TOCP that would be found in even in the highly unlikely worst case of contamination from oil leaking into the air supply lead us to conclude that the concerns about significant risk to the health of airline passengers and crew are not substantiated".
	That is from a greatly respected committee of this House.
	Of course, I recognise that this was six years ago, and that there may be new evidence. The Department for Transport, via the Aviation Health Working Group, has arranged for the independent Committee on Toxicity—the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, sought to make a point about independence—to review any evidence which BALPA wants to produce. This process is currently under way, and BALPA presented its case to the Health Protection Agency on 22 February as part of the preparation for the formal COT meeting, which will be held in public, possibly in May or July this year. So action is being taken on these issues, particularly on the concerns identified by BALPA, and examination will be conducted in public.
	The agency is doing a thorough job. Far from limiting itself to the BALPA material, it has posed questions to the CAA and to engine-oil manufacturers. We take the view that we should rely on the COT report to help us to specify any further research needs in an area where public funds have already been invested without a link between cabin air and long-term health problems being found. If, ultimately, a need is demonstrated for some kind of action, such as design changes or regulation, the Government would need evidence to convince the other EU member states to investigate. Noble Lords should remember that air transport is never an issue only for specific legislation for all sorts of obvious reasons, one of which is that a problem with an aircraft will affect more than one national carrier that uses that aircraft.
	No EU member state except the United Kingdom is currently investigating this issue. In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration has granted funds for research, but little has happened. The project now appears to be looking to the United Kingdom to get the fieldwork done, although that surely could not have been the original intention as we were not involved in the original scheme. We may yet participate in that project if it turns out to match our identified needs after the COT review.
	I hope that I have established that this Government, beyond all other governments, are taking the issue of aviation health seriously. The current arrangements were set up in response to your Lordships' Select Committee inquiry in 2000. I might add that the Transport Committee in another place, chaired by my redoubtable honourable friend Gwyneth Dunwoody, only last month completed a thorough series of evidence sessions into the work of the Civil Aviation Authority. The committee had the advantage of seeing the questions asked by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, and the answers that I gave, which he said were less than satisfactory in some areas, and considered all those factors, too.
	During those hearings, BALPA representatives put forward their views on cabin air. However, the Transport Committee did not pursue this issue when it came to question my honourable friend the Aviation Minister. It would be a brave Member of this House, particularly a Member with experience of the other place, who would say that this was through the neglect or timidity of a Select Committee chaired by my honourable friend in the other place. I therefore conclude that serious consideration of these issues may not quite lead to the conclusions reached by the noble Countess in proposing her amendment. This is a serious issue, which we are addressing. We do not think that establishing a new organisation of the sort suggested in this amendment is warranted.
	I have a little note in my hand saying that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, asked me six quick questions. I have listed them: they are not quick, they are not easy, and I shall not be able to answer them in such a short time. I am sure that the noble Lord will forgive me for that. He asked who was responsible for the safety of passengers and crew. The Department for Transport is responsible. We are responsible for aircraft flying under UK auspices and from UK airports, and we will not renege on that responsibility. On the specific cases which the noble Lord mentioned, he will have to forgive me if, in this general debate, I cannot reply to him in detail now.
	I congratulate again the noble Countess on her pursuit of a very serious issue, which we take very seriously. Her contribution to this debate is of great importance, as is that of the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, and my noble friend Lord Clinton-Davis. We do not, however, think that the proposed solution in this amendment is the way forward. I hope she will recognise that we are tackling the issue seriously and respect her views, and that she will be prepared to withdraw her amendment.

Lord Ramsbotham: My Lords, I thank and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, on obtaining this important and timely debate. I say important, because I believe that any time spent discussing the safeguarding of tomorrow's generation is important. I say timely, because the inquiry of the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, of which I was very privileged to be a member, only recently published its report about the safeguarding of children. Only two days ago the Government's response to the paper produced by the joint chief inspectors on the safeguarding of children was also published.
	I was the Chief Inspector of Prisons when, for some reason or other, the previous Home Secretary, Michael Howard, decided it would be appropriate to introduce into this country a disastrous development in America known as the boot camps as a suitable way of dealing with our young offenders. I disagreed with him fundamentally then, and I disagree now. I quote from a report I wrote in 1997 about the treatment of young offenders:
	"Young prisoners will return to the community, and therefore it really does matter how they are treated in prison. The choice is ours. Either we can give them education, to make good the ravages of what they have denied themselves by truancy or been denied by exclusion, and opportunities for personal development within a structured, caring environment—which many have been denied in the chaotic circumstances of their home lives—and which we implicitly hold to be the way that can best lead to the development of responsible citizens, or we can continue on our present course, with all the damage that that is doing not only to the young people themselves but to the society to which they will return".
	I referred in the report to the tremendous inconsistency in the way in which we were treating children in custody. At the time that Michael Howard had the idea of secure training centres, there were local government secure homes, many of them extremely well run and very well staffed. At the other end of the scale, there were a number of young offender establishments in which, frankly, the treatment was outrageously poor and not only was the staffing negligent, the numbers of staff were far too few. On the first inspection of a juvenile establishment that I carried out, when I took an inspector of social services with me, he said that if this had been a social services establishment, it would have been closed because the treatment and conditions were not up to what was required by children.
	Then came the secure training centres. From the word go, they did not fit in anywhere—secure homes are part of social services provision under the Department of Health and young offender institutions are part of the Prison Service, coming under the Home Office. Secure training centres, run by private sector companies, did not come under either; they came under the Youth Justice Board when it started, which added a third source of direction.
	I seriously recommend that the Government look once again at the management and the direction of children in custody, wherever they are. Unless you have someone responsible and accountable for the delivery of what is done, working out what is appropriate and making certain that it is delivered, it will not happen. I recommended that in the same report in 1997—no action has been taken and there is still nobody in charge. The Youth Justice Board has oversight but that does not mean it checks what happens overall. I believe that until you get that right, you will not get the consistency of treatment which is crucial when you are dealing with children.
	I personally think it is an abomination that the age of criminal responsibility in this country should be 10. It is an abomination that children should be in prison. They should not be in prison—those are adult places. They should be somewhere else. But if they are in custody, the critical thing is to make certain that staff are trained and capable of looking after them. Again, we find inconsistency everywhere. Those in the social services centres are trained; those in the Prison Service are not yet properly trained.
	The secure training centres suffer from the problems that I have found with all private sector establishments. Turnover was too high, largely because of wages, and they were greatly understaffed. I was interested to see that the recent inspection reports of all four STCs showed serious staffing implications.
	At Oakhill, staffing numbers were regularly below acceptable levels for 80 places. There were no regular staff meetings. There was no external line manager to monitor the performance of the secure training centre. At Rainsbrook, roles and responsibilities for managers in the new structure had not yet been made sufficiently clear for lines of accountability to be fully understood. At Medway, active staff numbers are to continue to remain low, placing significant pressures on the establishment. The external manager for the centre was acting as the director; therefore, the centre did not have an external manager to monitor its performance. At Hassockfield, supervision of staff needs to occur and to be recorded more consistently. Management development should be a feature of the next stage of development planning. And so on.
	We have heard a lot of about the treatment, the conditions and their unacceptability. There are masses of solutions and ideas out there; they all refer to the same things—direction and staffing. I really hope that the Government will at last listen to what people have been saying, year after year, and put those two things right, because they are fundamental to any development which has this desperately important role of safeguarding the treatment of our children who are in custody.

Baroness Stern: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, for arranging this debate, for her dedication in visiting the secure training centres and finding out what they are really like and, most of all, for sharing with this House her long expertise in childcare, her deep understanding of the needs of children and her clear vision from that perspective of why what has been set up and delivered through the secure training centres is so very wrong.
	Thanks to the heroic and persistent work of Sally Keeble MP and the very searching work done by the inquiry team led by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, we now know enough to be sure that something is deeply wrong. The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, says in his introduction that the way children are treated in penal custody would in other circumstances,
	"trigger a child protection investigation and could even result in criminal charges".
	In its visits to STCs the inquiry found in one or other of them a lack of privacy in that staff could see the children having their showers. It found that the method of restraint used in STCs can involve the use of pain, particularly to the nose, and that restraint was used 3,289 times in 2003 for fewer than 200 children at any one time. Figures for one STC also showed that, within an 18-month period, single separation—which is a euphemism for solitary confinement—was used 285 times. STCs now use handcuffs, and Sally Keeble MP found that handcuffs were used 11 times in one month in one STC last year.
	This is a grim and dismal picture. This treatment is being meted out to children as young as 12—not tough, well-balanced, secure and happy children; of course not. Seventy-seven per cent of them, or nearly eight out of 10, were designated by the Youth Justice Board in September 2005 as "vulnerable". It may be that some observers, people on the outside who are concerned with childcare and crime prevention, are confused. They may think, "How can this be going on when these children are placed by the Youth Justice Board, which is a very respectable body run by people well known for their knowledge in the field". Perhaps people will think that it is not as bad as it sounds—perhaps they will think that it is alright. So it is important to say clearly that it is not alright—it is absolutely not alright.
	A Youth Justice Board document called Strategy for the Secure Estate for Children and Young People, refers, on page 5, under the heading "Achievements", to
	"the expansion of secure training centre . . . provision by 144 places".
	That is set out as an achievement. When we read that, we have to ask what can be guiding the board in making its decisions about the care of the vulnerable children entrusted to it. That addition of 144 places was hailed as an achievement not in a vacuum but after there had been deaths, after the information that restraints had been used in the STCs 11,593 times since 1999 and, presumably, with a knowledge of the strip searching and the use of handcuffs, as well as the knowledge of the criticisms by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Council of Europe human rights commissioner. Since then, more contracts have been signed for units to accommodate young girls, some of them with babies. A United States judge recently talked about the moral blindness creeping into the criminal justice system. Is it, we must ask, infecting the Youth Justice Board? I make it clear that that is a criticism not of the multinational security companies that provide these places but of those who contract with them.
	Finally, we must ask why we here in Parliament have not been more determined in our efforts to monitor what is going on and bring abuses to light. Here we face a difficulty, because information is very hard to come by. Much of the information that we have heard tonight comes not from official reports nor from inspection reports by the Commission for Social Care Inspection, but from parliamentary Questions and a Howard League inquiry. We do not have the sort of information that we have about prisons, which comes to us from reports of the Chief Inspector of Prisons. The Youth Justice Board glossy documents are not informative.
	On 26 January, the Joint Committee on Human Rights, of which I am a member, wrote to the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, following up an earlier letter that said:
	"The Committee's report on compliance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child concluded that the level of physical restraint experienced by children in detention represented an unacceptable contravention of the Convention on the Rights of the Child".
	In our subsequent letter, we said:
	"Regular updates on the staffing levels Secure Training Centres, as well as on the use of restraints and non-accidental injuries (including self-harm) would enable Parliament, and the Committee, to exercise an effective scrutiny role on a matter which is significant in the protection of the human rights of particularly vulnerable children".
	We went on to ask if the Home Office could report to Parliament with regularly updated information, perhaps every three months.
	I hope that the Minister will be able to tell the House when the Home Office is likely to reply to that suggestion and if the reply is likely to be positive, as I very much hope it will be.

The Earl of Listowel: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, for securing this debate and for her persistent and passionate advocacy of children in secure training centres. I welcome the fact that the Minister responding has social work training and will understand the concerns expressed in the House that children are being placed in such inappropriate settings and that the social care model is the correct one.
	I wish to address the issue of training, support and supervision for staff in secure training centres, making a comparison with provision in children's homes. We know that there is, sadly, an over-representation of children in local authority care in the criminal justice system. Many of the troubled and troubling children in children's homes are not that different to those in secure training centres. Good practice in children's homes should be very similar to good practice in secure training centres. The Social Exclusion Unit identified 60 per cent of children coming into care as having had experience of abuse or neglect and a further 10 per cent of a family breakdown. The Office for National Statistics found that in children's homes, which tend to take the most vulnerable and damaged young people, 68 per cent had mental disorders and 56 per cent had conduct disorders, which typically would include theft, fire-setting and other problems. There is a correspondence between the groups—although I am not saying that most children in children's homes are going to end up in the criminal justice system, or will misbehave in that way or have those troubles.
	In 1998, 70 to 80 per cent of staff in children's homes had no relevant qualification to work with these vulnerable children, and the most vulnerable children were being cared for by the least qualified staff. I am very glad that the Government recognised that and set a target that 80 per cent of such staff should have, by September last year, a national vocational qualification level 3 in childcare. That is a very basic start but it is a good start in the right direction.
	Why is training for staff so important? Of course it is necessary to understand control and restraint and to use it appropriately, and there are other important areas, but to my mind the crucial element is an understanding of child development. What flows from that is an understanding on the part of staff why one-to-one supervision with their manager is crucial to their successful functioning and why consultancy, which is normally to the staff group by a psychologist, psychiatrist or a child psychotherapist on an ongoing regular basis, is necessary and to be sought for. Training is vital for the confidence of staff to become people who learn throughout their time in residential settings and secure training centres to think about and to reflect on their practice, and to become sensitive and supportive individuals working in these difficult environments. It is the social care model.
	An article from the Scottish Journal of Residential Child Care by Andrew Kendrick, called "'A Different Way to Look at Things': The Development of Consultancy in a Residential Service for Children and Young People", from February-March 2005 states:
	"The support of consultancy and the tasks associated with consultation are considered to play a vital role in the development of good practice in residential care and in safeguarding children and young people. Back in the 1970s, Berry . . . recommended that all residential workers should have opportunities for support and consultation and 'every residential unit requires a special senior supporter who devotes himself . . . to the staff without being directly responsible for the children . . . a consultant, counsellor, supervisor or therapist' . . . More recently, however, Warner"—
	now the noble Lord, Lord Warner, in his report on staff in children's homes, called Choosing with Care—
	"highlighted that too often staff in children's homes are left to cope with abused, disturbed and violent young people",
	so similar to those in secure training centres,
	"without access to the specialist psychiatric and psychological services that are needed . . . He stressed the need for support from specialists in other agencies, such as child psychiatrists and educational psychologists, and for staff care schemes such as stress counselling".
	The management of stress is very important to this area too.
	Noble Lords have referred to the high vacancy rates throughout the secure training centre provisions. In children's homes last year vacancy rates were generally more than 11 per cent, and about 22 per cent in London, even higher than among child and family social workers, where there is the next highest level of vacancy in the social care arena. Many children's homes still do not have the support described as necessary by the noble Lord, Lord Warner, as I know very well.
	I conclude by asking the Minister if he would be good enough, when the contracts for these centres are next negotiated and the parameters set for the training, supervision and support for staff, to inform Peers taking part in the debate tonight so we can help shape the framework for the training and support of staff in these settings. I look forward to the Minister's response.

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, I join in the general congratulations and thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, on raising this important subject for debate this evening. I only wish we had a bigger audience for it, because it is certainly a subject that should command greater interest, not least because of the important issues it touches on.
	The noble Baroness made a number of important points, some of which I shall pick up on in what I say, but the key thing I take away from her contribution was that she made an unfavourable comparison between the STCs and the secure council-run homes that are provided. She rather favoured the way the latter operate. That is important, and the points of comparison are fairly critical to the way we look at this issue.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Massey, made a special plea that healthcare standards and education should be to the highest level, and that we should focus strongly on good practice in STCs. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, expressed his important views trenchantly as usual, which need to be taken account of, not least because of his vast experience in this field as an inspector. I listened very carefully, as ever, to what the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, had to say. She asserted at one point that there was something deeply wrong with STCs. From a government perspective I take issue with that, but the issues she raised of restraints, single separation, handcuff use and strip searches are of concern and require careful use and monitoring.
	The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, made important points, in particular about training and the quality of work undertaken in the establishments. I thank the noble Viscount, Lord Bridgeman, for his contributions on PPPs, drawing our attention to assault levels and the lessons that can be learnt from devolution.
	This has been a well informed debate, as one would expect from the cast involved. The use of custody for young people is, and is bound to be, a contentious subject about which people have very strong views. People in general firmly believe that custody has to be available as a last resort in response to the most serious offending, a view the Government fully share. But we also believe that, wherever possible, young people who commit offences other than the most serious should be dealt with in the community. Custodial establishments therefore have a limited role in response to offending by under-18s, but a vital one. At their best, they can offer young people the chance of a complete change of direction, by guiding them towards positive and worthwhile activities and away from the unproductive, sometimes destructive, life many of them have been leading. That is an essential part of what secure training centres are trying to achieve. Their emphasis on education, and on a full day of purposeful activity, can provide a new direction to lives previously lacking in purpose.
	How we treat young people in custody and find means to steer them away from offending into that more positive and productive way of life is a critical question. The recent report by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, on behalf of the Howard League for Penal Reform has usefully brought one aspect of the custody of young people to public attention. It is important to note that my ministerial colleagues will meet the noble Lord at the end of this month to discuss his findings. His report concerns a very specific part of how we treat young people in custody—what is generally referred to as behaviour management. He looked at behaviour management across the whole of the juvenile estate. By contrast, the noble Baroness raised the more general questions of the role and purpose of one particular part of that estate—the four secure training centres.
	It may help your Lordships if I briefly summarise the history of STCs. They began in the 1990s as establishments for young offenders between the ages of 12 and 14 who had been sentenced to a secure training order. The STO, which was introduced by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, was a short-lived order. It was replaced in 2000 by our Government with the detention and training order. The contract for the first centre at Medway in Rochester was signed in 1997 and the centre opened in April 1998 with places for 40 young people. A further two centres of similar size at Rainsbrook, near Rugby, and Hassockfield in County Durham opened in 1999. In 2002 capacity at Medway and Rainsbrook was increased to 76 beds and at Hassockfield to 42. A fourth centre, Oakhill in Milton Keynes, opened in August 2004 with places for 80 young people. In all, the four centres can accommodate up to 274 people—a small number.
	The detention and training order, which replaced the STO in April 2000, was available for young offenders aged 12 to 17. The STCs therefore began taking a wider age range. As well as DTO trainees, the wider intake included young people serving longer terms of detention under Sections 90 and 91 of the Powers of Criminal Courts (Sentencing) Act 2000. The Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001 enabled young people who had been remanded to the care of a local authority with a security requirement to be placed in a secure training centre with the consent of the Secretary of State.
	Secure training centres as they have developed now accommodate young people of both sexes between the ages of 12 and 17 who have either received a custodial sentence or have been remanded to secure care. Why do we send young people to custody? We do it because their offending is so serious that there is no realistic alternative. We do it to protect the public. People expect—and are entitled to expect—that the justice system will take proportionate measures to protect them from significant harm. While the young person is in custody there is an opportunity to try to steer him or her away from offending behaviour and into useful and life-enhancing activities. Most young people who go to custody serve short sentences and are not out of the community for a very long period. It is essential therefore to try to ensure that when they are released they do not simply start again where they left off; in other words, that they do not return to offending. The period in custody provides the chance to break what has usually become a pattern of offending and to prepare the young person for a new life after custody. For that reason detention and training orders, which are the main custodial sentence for under-18s, are structured in two parts with the first half spent in custody and the second under supervision in the community. Work begun in custody—for example in improving literacy and numeracy—can form the basis for continued education or training after release.
	Of course, not all young people serving custodial sentences are placed in a secure training centre. Most—about 85 per cent—are placed in youth offender institutions run by the Prison Service. The remaining 15 per cent are divided roughly equally between STCs, which are run by private firms under contract to the Youth Justice Board, and secure children's homes, which are run by local authorities. Each type of establishment has its own characteristics. Young offender institutions are generally larger establishments for offenders aged 15 to 17. Secure training centres and secure children's homes take predominantly a younger age group though they also accommodate some older trainees who are particularly vulnerable. The ethos of secure training centres and secure children's homes is similar. STCs are larger, as I said, but the trainees live in small units that house up to eight, and both types of establishment have a very high staff-to-trainee ratio, which allows trainees to receive a great deal of individual attention.
	Because they are larger than secure children's homes, STCs can provide a more varied regime. Their particular strength is in education, which continues all through the year—there are no school holidays—and enables trainees serving longer terms to make real progress. This is very important because, as we know, studies have shown that persistent offending and low educational attainment are closely linked. Most trainees have serious problems with literacy and numeracy. It is heartening, therefore, that in 2003–04—the latest year for which figures are available—100 per cent of STC trainees improved their literacy and numeracy by at least one skill level. That is a better performance than was achieved in either young offender institutions or secure children's homes.
	There has, of course, been much concern about two deaths that occurred at Rainsbrook and Hassockfield in 2004. The death of any young person in custody or elsewhere is always a tragedy. I cannot comment on the events surrounding the deaths of Gareth Myatt and Adam Rickwood because investigations are in progress and inquests have yet to be held. However, I can assure the House that the Government and the Youth Justice Board are taking all possible measures to safeguard young people in STCs.
	I know there is a body of opinion which holds that the private sector has no role to play in the provision of custody, but I was interested to note that the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, speaking at the launch of his report, said that he did not mind whether a custodial establishment was run by the public or private sector as long as it was run well. That is a very practical and sensible view. I think it is now generally agreed that the introduction of privately run prisons has helped to raise standards in the adult estate and I believe that the secure training centres are playing a similar role in the secure estate for children and young people. It is also true that secure training centres are able to take some trainees whose behaviour cannot be managed effectively in a secure children's home.
	STCs have made a valuable contribution to the secure estate for children and young people, generally providing high standards of care and education to very difficult and often very troubled young people. They are part of our vision of a diversified estate which provides for a variety of needs and demands. Those who advocate limiting custodial provision to secure children's homes should face the fact that those homes are not suitable for many young offenders and that they would not be able to cope with them.
	A number of points have been raised, some of which I shall try to cover in the brief time available to me in which to speak. The noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, argued the case for small, local SCHs. The Youth Justice Board purchases 235 places in secure children's homes and we fully accord with the valuable role that they play in the special circumstances for young trainees. The noble Baroness asked about a strategic review. In November the Youth Justice Board published its strategy for the secure estate for children and young people and outlined plans for improving provision, including a new capital programme, additional training of staff and enhanced regimes. That has now been taken forward.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Massey, made reference to good practice. I argue that the 25 hours per week of taught lesson time, the classes taking place in small groups with highly qualified teaching staff, and the fact that—as I said earlier—100 per cent of trainees serving sentences of six months or more have improved literacy and numeracy by at least one skill level is evidence of increased good practice within the estate.
	My time is now up, sadly. Other points were made about strip searching which I shall try to address in correspondence. The noble Baroness, Lady Stern, asked a question in response to a letter seeking regular reports to Parliament on restraint. The noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, has replied to Andrew Dismore MP, the chair of the Human Rights Committee, and promised that regular reports would be made. I repeat that commitment this evening. It is very important that that information is put into the public domain.
	I again thank the noble Baroness for her persistence on this issue, as ever. It is some years since we had a debate on STCs, on which the House clearly needs to be advised regularly. We undertake to do all that we can to ensure that that is the case.

Lord Hanningfield: My Lords, I am pleased to share the amendment with the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis, who is not in the Chamber at the moment. Noble Lords will no doubt recall the substance of the amendment from Grand Committee. I do not want to go through the whole subject again, but it is important that I repeat some of the points on the amendment, which is designed to remove a manifest injustice and a potential financial threat to aircraft operators of all nationalities using our airspace. The amendment would achieve that by introducing provisions for civil aviation that are similar to those currently enjoyed by merchant shipping. The noble Baroness sitting opposite will remember that we debated the Merchant Shipping (Pollution) Bill. What I am suggesting here is something similar to that.
	I do not wish to repeat all the arguments in favour of what I consider to be a sensible amendment, but I wish to address some of the apparent objections made by the Minister during our previous debate. He was of the view that if aircraft owners are relieved of the burden of paying for damage on the ground caused by terrorists, that burden would fall immediately and exclusively on the British taxpayer. That is not the case. Where human victims are concerned, there is an existing responsibility assumed by the state since 1964 and facilitated by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority, the CICA. All 25 EU states are required to have similar schemes in operation. Nor is it the case in relation to property damage, which was the burden of the Minster's objection. As far as I am aware, and according to the legal experts I consulted, the state has no liability to compensate businesses or property owners who are damaged by criminals or terrorists.
	That is why since 1993 we have had a system to ensure that adequate commercial insurance may be in place to cover terrorism risks, supported by the reinsurance vehicle known as the Pool Re. The scheme was amended in the light of 9/11, but does not so far cover household insurance. That cost is met by premiums paid, not by the Treasury. Noble Lords can see that in relation to the separate needs of human victims and business or property interests arising out of terrorism, we have existing schemes of compensation for humans, and insurance for the property interests.
	As noble Lords will understand, the resources of an aircraft owner are inevitably finite. The main resource of the aircraft owner or operator will be an insurance policy with a maximum liability limit which I am told is around $2 billion. It is sometimes more and sometimes less, but it is always a great deal more than the European minimum requirements. We are told that the total cost of 9/11 as paid by insurers and by the US Government approached $40 billion. If anything on the scale of 9/11 should succeed over here, I cannot imagine that the cost would be anywhere near the US total. But even if it approached, say, only one-tenth of that total for one aircraft, it would probably transcend the limits of the airline's insurance policy and would probably bankrupt the airline and/or the aircraft owner. In those circumstances no claimant, human or property, could receive full compensation; all would be reduced to a dividend after lengthy legal processes. Only the CICA would provide reasonable and timely compensation.
	As your Lordships' House will recall, the body of the amendment is copied from the main defences allowed to a ship owner by the Merchant Shipping (Pollution) Bill in relation to oil pollution. Unfortunately, the Minister seemed to misunderstand the purpose of this amendment when he commented in Committee:
	"So it looks as though the noble Lord has extrapolated from the maritime example and has substituted for the international fund the UK Government and the taxpayer".—[Official Report, 8/12/05; col. GC 175.]
	That is not the case. The International Oil Pollution Compensation Funds are designed to provide compensation in excess of the ship owner's liability. However, that is incidental, since the amendment does not seek to substitute to the British taxpayer for some aviation version of the International Oil Pollution Compensation Funds. What is crucial is that neither the IOPC Funds nor ship owners are liable if it can be proved that the pollution damage resulted from an act of war, civil war or insurrection. That defence is only part of what has been taken from Merchant Shipping (Pollution) Act.
	The central purpose of the amendment is to alleviate a manifest injustice that uniquely and adversely affects British and foreign aircraft owners. It would seem entirely sensible to use the opportunity afforded in the Bill to address that deficiency and furnish aviation with the same defences available to ship owners. I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis, is in the Chamber to add to this. I beg to move.

Lord Clinton-Davis: My Lords, I have great pleasure in supporting the amendment, which is helpful not only to British interests but to foreign airlines which are affected by the work of terrorists and by the impact of our law on absolute liability.
	I do not confine my attention solely to British interests, because our law applies to all aircraft and to their owners. For that reason we can recognise that the situation that we envisage is more universal. I suspect that my noble friend Lord Davies was merely laying the ground when we discussed this matter in Grand Committee and he stated the Government's preference for some form of international agreement. He concluded that the International Civil Aviation Organisation, which was convening a meeting, might revise the 1952 Rome convention—but, as he said, the conclusion to those negotiations would take years. I am not sure that there will be a positive outcome on this issue. We are saying—and I think that the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, would agree—that now is the time that we can do something about the matter, not wait until the conclusion of the ICAO negotiations.
	It is not as if we have not experienced such situations in this country—only last July, here in London, there was a threat that involved a large number of people being injured as a result of the terrorist attacks. We are not all that far from what happened on 11 September. With this amendment, we can take immediate and sensible steps in relation to the threat. We are able to protect both British and foreign interests. There will be no additional impost affecting the British taxpayer. I repeat: to wait for the outcome of the international deliberations is not acceptable.
	Therefore, I am prepared to support the amendment. First, it allows the aircraft owner to defend himself in the event of a criminal or terrorist attack from the ground or the air. That is precisely what we were arguing for in Grand Committee and was the subject of my amendment. Secondly, for the aircraft owner the amendment adds a conventional defence, already approved in principle by Parliament, if an aircraft crash resulted from and act of war, hostilities, civil war or insurrection. Thirdly, I understand that the amendment is the preferred choice of leading airline lawyers. But most important, as I said, there is no additional burden on British taxpayers.
	Of course, this is a complicated issue; it is not something that we can resolve immediately. I hope that this amendment will be withdrawn, but I think that we ought to come back to the issue on Third Reading, because it is of vital concern not only to the British taxpayer, but internationally.

Baroness D'Souza: My Lords, I am fully aware that we are at Report stage and I will therefore be as brief and to the point as I can. However, this is an important matter: the amendment aims to provide a simple but effective mechanism to investigate aircraft suspected of being involved in the illegal practice of extraordinary rendition.
	There is no suggestion that the UK Government are practising, or have ever practised, extraordinary rendition in any form—of course not. But up until Monday of this week, there was circumstantial evidence to suggest that the UK may have facilitated this practice by allowing refuelling stops by aircraft used by the US Government or private aircraft owned or leased by the CIA for the purpose of transporting detainees to a third country for interrogation. Yesterday, the Armed Forces Minister, Adam Ingram, disclosed that aircraft suspected of being used by the CIA had in fact landed at British military airfields.
	When this issue was first raised in Grand Committee last December, it was judged to be both inappropriate and inapplicable in large part due to the terms of the Chicago convention. However, that is now acknowledged by the Government to be irrelevant, and I quote the answer given by the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, in response to a Written Question from the noble Lord, Lord Lester:
	"Nothing in the Chicago convention restricts the right of the appropriate authorities under UK law to board an aircraft for the purpose of arresting a person who they have reasonable grounds to suspect has committed or is committing an offence".—[Official Report, 1/3/06; col. WA 62.]
	In fact, research carried out by experts in international transport law shows that the Chicago convention and the later Tokyo convention impose a positive duty on the part of government to investigate. The Tokyo Convention, for example, allows a state to interfere with an aircraft in flight if,
	"the exercise of jurisdiction is necessary to ensure the observance of any obligation of such State under a multilateral international agreement".
	We are dealing here with illegal seizing, transport and possible—even likely—torture of individuals. This practice infringes just about every human rights treaty on the books, including the torture convention, which, as is well recognised, carries an absolute prohibition of torture, no matter what the circumstances.
	The facts surrounding this practice of extraordinary rendition are hard to come by. However, such is the concern, uncertainty and suspicion that it has occurred and continues to occur, possibly on a regular basis, that no fewer than 10 European member states have set up official inquiries into US transport and CIA flights into their respective countries. The Secretary-General of the Council of Europe reported last week on a year-long study into extraordinary rendition, in which he said:
	"It would appear that most of Europe is a happy hunting ground for foreign security services".
	He goes on to say that,
	"hardly any country . . . has any legal provision to ensure effective oversight of the activities of foreign security services on their territory".
	I quote again:
	"European skies appear to be excessively open . . . very few countries seem to have adopted an adequate and effective way to monitor who and what is transiting their airports and airspace. Indeed, no member state appears to have established any kind of procedure in order to assess whether civil aircraft are used for purposes which would be incompatible with internationally recognised human rights standards. This is alarming because the explanations provided on the specific point of controls over aircraft allegedly used for rendition show that existing procedures do not provide adequate safeguards against abuse".
	The former Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, is quoted in a report by the Swiss Senator Mr Dick Marty as accusing a number of European countries of hypocrisy in that, while benefiting from the intelligence that the Americans gather, they publicly distance themselves from the methods by which it is obtained. The UK National Air Traffic Services confirmed on 22 February of this year that in the past five years two aircraft believed to have been chartered by the CIA, as identified by their registration numbers, had passed through the UK on more than 200 occasions.
	The Government, in denying any awareness of extraordinary rendition, have relied heavily on a firm statement made by the current Secretary of State, Miss Condoleezza Rice, just prior to her departure for a European tour last December, in which her very carefully crafted words denied any involvement in extraordinary rendition. However, we have to be very cautious here. The US has derogated from the "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" clause of the UN torture convention. This allows it to interpret such acts as falling short of torture. Moreover, the wording of the statement includes the sentence,
	"the US has not and will not transport anyone to a country where the United States believes that the person will be tortured".
	It could well be argued that what the US believes does not necessarily conform to the beliefs of the international human rights community.
	I am as interested in preventing terrorist acts as anyone else. I do not wish to appear a harridan, but the practice of extraordinary rendition is monstrous and monstrously illegal. The amendment before your Lordships, for which I gratefully acknowledge the painstaking work of Liberty, Redress, the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture and several legal experts, is straightforward and highly relevant to the Civil Aviation Bill in that it deals with a mechanism to ensure that aircraft flights conform with the statutory obligations of the Government. It simply empowers the appropriate authorities to require aircraft suspected of being involved in extraordinary rendition to land and to be searched. I suggest that this is the only way in which dangerous rumours and suspicions can be put to rest and any future acts of extraordinary rendition via the UK can be pre-empted. I beg to move.

Lord Garden: My Lords, I support this amendment, which is also in my name. The credit for it, however, must go to the noble Baroness, Lady D'Souza, for having seized the opportunity that the Bill gives us to address the serious problem of rendition.
	We explored the issue in Grand Committee, and the noble Baroness has explained the importance of clarity in this area. We accept the Government's assurances that they will not facilitate rendition of people through UK airspace or airfields. After all, in Grand Committee, the Minister gave us such an assurance in the strongest of terms:
	"There is not a Member in this Committee, not a Member in this House and not a Member in another place who is not greatly exercised about the issues. It has been made clear by the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary that our abhorrence of the concept of torture is such that we will have no compliant part in it in any shape or form".
	These are strong assurances. I am sure that your Lordships will welcome such assurances from the government Benches.
	In Grand Committee, the Minister made it clear that the problem was that he saw the amendment as one which would wreck the Bill:
	"We could not possibly put into legislation an amendment which abrogated our obligations under international conventions for air travel".—[Official Report, 8/12/05; GC169.]
	As we have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady D'Souza, he should be happy now, because we have done the necessary work to show that that was a misconception. We understand that, in the pressure of Grand Committee, one can often make mistakes about the intricacies of international law. We have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, that the Chicago Convention will be fine under this; we have had it from our expert air legal adviser, Professor Richard Gardiner of the University College London, that Tokyo Convention Articles 3.3 and 3.4 come into play. All these things make it possible for this amendment to work.
	I am not a lawyer, but it seems that we all agree that we must investigate and then prevent flights which facilitate torture, and that we are allowed to do so under international aviation conventions. This amendment gives us a way to make it happen. I trust that the Government will now accept it, having had an opportunity to look at our international obligations in more detail than was possible in Grand Committee.
	One more aspect which concerns me is the exchange of correspondence between Adam Ingram, the Defence Minister in the other place, and my right honourable friend Sir Menzies Campbell, reported in yesterday's Guardian. That has lifted the lid on the involvement of military airfields in providing access to these mysterious CIA-sponsored aircraft. In Grand Committee, I asked the Minister for some explanation of the status of charter aircraft operating on behalf of a foreign government, but received no answer. Now that we know that these aircraft operate through RAF Brize Norton and RAF Northolt, we need to think through what that means for how they are handled.
	RAF Northolt will be familiar to those who have had ministerial appointments. It is a rather special airfield; it is where ministerial, Royal and other VIP flights operate from. It is also, because of its location close to Heathrow, restricted in the number of movements allowed, so I assume that the authorities take some interest in every flight authorised into and out of RAF Northolt. I suggest that easyJet might find it difficult to get slots there.
	Presumably the station commander has some guidance about which flights he is allowed to accept, or perhaps a direction from her Majesty's Government. These fights cannot count obviously as United States military flights because the military does not operate them. Whatever their status—I would be interested to know how the Minister sees their status—I trust that the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General has given his, as always, very useful advice to the Chief of the Defence Staff, who in turn can relay it to the group captain at Northolt just to ensure that he is not committing an illegal act by providing facilities for an aircraft that might be involved in extraordinary rendition.
	The amendment would give much-needed clarity on what must be done, and, we can assume, would ensure that both the civil and military authorities would take appropriate action when they needed to follow up suspicions. I look forward to hearing from the Government their full support for it.

Lord Roper: My Lords, I made a brief intervention in Grand Committee in support of the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady D'Souza, and I would like to do the same today. I have at least one question for the Minister. Before coming to it, the arguments produced in Grand Committee about the Chicago Convention should now be laid to rest. A more serious argument, perhaps, is whether this is the right place for such an amendment. If the Government are going to say that this is not the right place, they are obliged at least to tell the House where the right place is for an amendment on this topic. In this respect I am, in a sense, picking up the argument of the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis. It is a matter of serious concern. Noble Lords in all parts of the House are concerned about the good name of the United Kingdom in this matter, as the Minister made clear in Grand Committee, and my noble friend Lord Garden has already referred to it. If the Minister is going to say, "Yes, this is a fair point but not the right place" he is obliged to tell the House what is the right place for such an amendment.

Lord Dykes: My Lords, I thank wholeheartedly not only my colleagues but the sponsors of the new clause from other Benches. I support all the arguments that have been deployed so far. I shall add a few brief points of my own, conscious of the fact that I was not in Grand Committee and that the House is now reaching a late hour. However, it is the job of the Minister to give a convincing response—at least intermediate, provisional and pro tem answers—to some serious questions that have been raised in this debate.
	What is happening in Guantanamo Bay and the extraordinary rendition scandal—that is the only word for it—are the two things that cause more unease than any other aspect; not least, the activities of the coalition forces in Iraq, the insurgency, and all that. Therefore, it is a very solemn moment at this stage of this Bill for the Government to reflect soberly about those searing and searching questions. I agree most warmly with the noble Baroness, Lady D'Souza, in her, as my noble friend Lady Williams said, brilliant explanation of the detail on this matter; and the disturbing aspect also alluded to by the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis: the United Kingdom gives the impression of compliance and complicity in a matter that is wholly unlawful internationally and should be rejected by a country such as the United Kingdom, which prides itself on its continued adherence to the rule of law.
	I think that I am allowed to say without offending anyone—because there are pluses and minuses in these long histories—that there have been questionable activities by the CIA throughout the world for many decades. We think of South America; we think of Indonesia many years ago; we think of aspects of CIA behaviour elsewhere. That is why we in this House and in the other place are grateful for the vigilance of the British and international press on those matters and the demand for the Americans to change their practices. The answers given by Condoleezza Rice were not answers at all. They were evasions of a true answer. That must be addressed again at the highest levels of the US Administration. That is causing massive concern not only in the United Kingdom but in the other member states of the European Union, especially those who feel that they are being illegally used without their governments knowing anything about it. That is an extraordinary state of affairs that must be dealt with.
	I am glad that the "unlawful rendition" definition is dealt with in one subsection of the new clause, because the adjective itself allows the United Kingdom to make a first step in legal terms to cover itself from being complicit in acts of the United States that are totally illegal under international law. But that is only a first, small step, and more needs to be done. The only way that the United Kingdom can stay within both the international convention on human rights, especially on torture and the use of torture, and the European Convention on Human Rights is to excise and exorcise those practices and insist that our American allies and colleagues—so they are called; and if they are allies and colleagues in the true sense, they will respond to our overtures—outlaw those practices.
	Although I am not an expert observer of the construction and definition of the wording, I am especially minded to be attracted by new subsection (5), which, if the new clause were enacted, allows officers to remove items from planes suspected of unlawful or illegal activities.
	The noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis, may be correct that perhaps separate primary legislation should be considered, and Third Reading may provide further opportunities to discuss these matters. But, in the meantime, surely it is the duty of the Minister, who is well respected in this House for his very high standard of response, to give us some preliminary reassurances that the Government take this matter very seriously, particularly in view of the United States Government's inadequate explanation and the fact that the names of detainees have disappeared, other names have not been mentioned, and no one knows who these detainees are or where they are in the world. Are they in Guantanamo Bay or elsewhere? Are they in European countries? Have they been sent to Egypt or to other countries? There are rumours that they have been sent to Syria, which sounds extraordinary, bearing in mind the regular United States hostility towards that country. These matters must be dealt with, and I hope that the Minister will be able to give us some reassurances, at least on a holding basis, this evening.

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, we owe a debt of gratitude to the noble Baroness, Lady D'Souza, for re-introducing this topic, which occupied us for a short time in Committee in somewhat frenetic circumstances, as I think the House will recognise. My department was certainly living from hand to mouth when it came to getting information, which inevitably had to come from a number of sources and which in some respects was very difficult to obtain. We all know the reasons for that; there were many contentions, but very little that could be substantiated. So there was difficulty in replying in Committee, but we have moved on from that, and I want to respond as best I can to the points that have been made today.
	I understand the concern expressed by the noble Lords, Lord Dykes and Lord Hylton, about these issues—a concern that was most graphically expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady D'Souza, when she referred to our repugnance for any activities involving torture in which we might inadvertently have been complicit. But this is not Foreign Office Question Time, so I am not here to answer Foreign Office policy in quite those terms. My task is to say whether this legislation, or an amendment to it, would improve the situation. In saying that, I resile in no way from the remarks I made in Committee—far from it. I share with all noble Lords the very great concern that I think the whole country feels about this issue.
	The problem with the clause is that this legislation is concerned with aviation matters. Dealing with a clause which concerns how to deal with extraordinary rendition, or how we would dissuade allies and friendly powers, if they were engaged in such a thing, to desist, is not my business today. My business is whether this amendment would deal with the issue that has been identified, which is of concern to us all, and whether it applies to this legislation.
	My contention is that, of course, there are aspects of work which the Government and the Department for Transport, which is the department on whose behalf I am replying today, can do with regard to aviation matters in order to allay some of the concerns expressed today. I doubt whether I will be able to allay every concern. I recognise that this issue will be raised in other fora with members of the Government in far more responsible and elevated positions than I. who will be able to reply on those general issues. But, on this Bill, the proposed new clause tabled by the noble Baroness will not work.
	Let me explain why. The reason why no action was taken against aircraft involved in unlawful renditions using UK facilities on the ground or travelling through our airspace is simply because there was no credible evidence that that had occurred. We did not have evidence which gave us cause to take action. That has been made clear in Ministerial Statements and PQ Answers. Since this Government came to power, they have authorised the use of UK facilities for two prisoner transfers to the United States where the prisoners were subsequently tried, and they were declined with regard to two other transfers where we did not think that the evidence stood up. It has been widely reported that specific US-registered aircraft, allegedly linked to the CIA, have used UK facilities for renditions. But we have no compelling evidence to suggest that those aircraft have been linked to unlawful activity while in or overflying the United Kingdom.
	The Chicago convention is clear on this. We certainly have the right to investigate an aircraft, but, of course, we have to have good grounds for doing so. If credible intelligence of serious illegal activity comes to light regarding an aircraft in flight, the Government can certainly require the aircraft to land. Article 3 bis of the Chicago convention allows states to require aircraft to land if there are reasonable grounds to conclude that the aircraft is being used for any purpose that is inconsistent with the aims of the convention.
	If the aircraft is on the ground the control authorities—police, Customs and immigration—have a variety of powers to enter, take evidence and make arrests. So, under the convention, we have the powers. The question addressed to us is why those powers were not exercised if there had been credible evidence that this was going on. We had no such evidence, which is why action was not taken. I am emphasising that subsection (1) of the proposed clause is unnecessary, because what subsection (1) would empower us to do, we already have the rights and powers to do. Moreover, it will be recognised that from the Prime Minister and down through all ranks of government it is clear that the Government are determined to act if evidence of such activity should ever arise.
	The wider issue of the transportation by air of persons deprived of their liberty—

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
	[Amendment No. 23 not moved.]

Baroness Crawley: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, and my noble friend Lord Carter for bringing us back to the Bill, as it were.
	The amendment proposes the introduction of a scheme by which clearance costs for guide dogs and other assistance dogs entering the UK by air under the pet passport scheme, or pet travel scheme as it is otherwise known in the UK, would be met by airlines. The Government have given the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, and my noble friend Lord Carter careful consideration and have concluded that its aims can be achieved without an amendment to the Civil Aviation Bill. Before I explain the reasons in detail, let me say that the Government recognise the excellent work that is carried out by the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association and other assistance dog organisations in promoting the interests of their members and the welfare of guide and assistance dogs. Those bodies have worked closely and fruitfully with the Government in the past and will, I am sure, continue to do so.
	The pet passport scheme permits the entry of dogs, including guide and other assistance dogs, into the UK without the need for quarantine, as the noble Lord said, provided they meet certain rules. It has proved popular since its launch six years ago. It has also been welcomed by guide and other assistance dog owners who can—many do—travel abroad with their dogs. The pet passport scheme is adopted by all EU countries under legislation that came into force in July 2003 and applied in July 2004. That legislation sets down the certification requirements for all dogs and cats moving between EU countries and into the EU from other countries. The UK checks all animals coming in, whether they come from the EU or elsewhere, because, along with a number of other member states, it has a special derogation, which will be reviewed by the European Commission in 2007. The derogation requires animals to be blood tested and to be treated for ticks and tapeworms before entry. The UK clearance checks are there to ensure that there is compliance with those extra rules. I should add that, under European law, all member states are required to check all animals coming in from outside the EU at the point of entry.
	When animals enter the UK by air, they will, in most cases, travel as cargo in the hold of the aircraft. However, under the pet passport scheme airlines may allow assistance dogs to travel in the cabin with their owner. Indeed, under the proposed EC regulation on air passenger rights for disabled people and people with reduced mobility, it will be a requirement for assistance dogs to be permitted to travel in the cabin. Where the dog is in the cabin, the owner and their dog are met on arrival by staff who check that the dog meets the requirements of the pet passport scheme. That ensures that throughout the journey and on landing the owner is not separated from their assistance dog.
	The airline may charge the owner for carrying out the pet passport checks. Whether it does so is currently a matter for the airline itself—as the noble Lord said, some do, some do not—and any company that it sub-contracts to carry out the checks on its behalf rather than government. I am sure that the noble Lord is aware of that. However, in the case of assistance dogs, some airlines waive the charges altogether.
	Indeed, guidelines drawn up by the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association, in conjunction with a number of UK airlines, recommend that assistance dog owners should not be charged directly for those clearance costs.
	I recognise that the aim of the amendment was to make it a legal requirement for those costs to be met by airlines. It appears to me, however, that provisions in the proposed EC regulation that I mentioned should make an amendment to the Civil Aviation Bill unnecessary. Article 8 of that regulation would require airlines to provide certain forms of assistance to disabled people without charge, one of which is to carry recognised assistance dogs free of charge in the aircraft cabin, subject to national regulations, and I will come to the question that my noble friend gave me notice of in a moment. That obligation should be capable of being construed so as to include all measures necessary to allow for the carriage of assistance dogs needed by disabled passengers, including clearance checks under the pets passport scheme. The Government gave priority to progressing that proposal during our recent presidency of the European Union. It has wide support from disability groups, and it provides a suitable framework for the carriage of assistance dogs into the UK. It has already been agreed by the European Parliament, and we expect it to be adopted without further debate at a forthcoming Council meeting.
	I have in front of me a number of reasons why the amendment is technically flawed which, given the hour, we will not go into tonight. In view of the European legislation that I have just discussed, which addresses discrimination against disabled people, I hope that my noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, will agree that an amendment to the Civil Aviation Bill is not necessary and will withdraw the amendment.
	I shall briefly address the question from my noble friend Lord Carter, who asked about national regulations. Article 8 of the proposed EU regulations that I have just been talking about requires airlines to provide certain forms of assistance to disabled people, which includes a requirement to carry recognised assistance dogs free of charge, subject to member states' national regulations. In the United Kingdom, those regulations are the Rabies (Importation of Dogs, Cats and Other Mammals) Order 1974, as amended, covering animals being imported into rabies quarantine, and the Non-Commercial Movement of Pet Animals (England) 2004, Schedule 1 of which sets out conditions of approval for air carriers to participate in the UK's pets travel scheme. That includes checking requirements and assurances that the animals are transported in an appropriate part of the aircraft and in appropriate conditions. It is an EU regulation that subsumes UK regulations. I ask noble Lords to withdraw the amendment.

Lord Hanningfield: My Lords, I want to move this amendment, even in view of the late hour. It is a new amendment, which emerged from a turkey lunch at Christmas with my nephew, who works for a Scandinavian airline. He thought that his ideas should be known, and he had been trying to talk to the officials, not knowing that I was doing this job. That is how the amendment arose. I will go into a little bit of detail; I am only trying to be helpful.
	Only recently, the Prime Minister himself acknowledged that climate change was the biggest threat facing our planet. It is therefore particularly important for us to consider that aviation emissions rose by 12 per cent in the past year and now account for 11 per cent of Britain's total greenhouse gas emissions—by far the fastest-growing sector. Moreover, environmentalists argue that greenhouse gas emissions from aircraft have increased by 73 per cent since 1990 and are on course to have grown by 150 per cent by 2012.
	In Grand Committee, the Minister made it clear that the Government viewed aviation as an international industry and were prepared to tackle the serious issue of aviation's impact on climate change only with reference to the aviation industry's incorporation into the EU emissions trading scheme. Much was made of the Minister's responses, because we had the extra leverage that the UK Government had at that stage in their EU presidency. Has there been any further progress since our presidency on some of those European issues?
	It is important not to forget that the problem of aviation-related air pollution has local as well as global consequences. My noble friend Lady Hanham touched on that when we debated health issues earlier.
	The amendment is designed to address the problem by presenting practical measures that build on current good practice and offer a tangible way to reduce airside emissions. Subsection (1) requires that, by 1 January 2009, the largest airports with over 50,000 movements a year make available fixed electrical ground power (FEGP) and pre-conditioned air at all their aircraft stands. Many airport operators already provide fixed electrical ground power; however, the additional requirement to provide pre-conditioned air means that there will be no reason to require the use of the aircraft's auxiliary power unit.
	All aircraft have an APU—all the technical stuff emerged from Christmas lunch—that provides power for the aircraft's systems and air conditioning while on the ground. APUs run on kerosene and that, as well as being extremely noisy, contributes to the volume of airside emissions. However, if an aircraft can receive its electrical power and conditioned air from an aircraft stand, it will be able to draw its power requirement from the national grid. That in turn means that the fossil fuel-burning APU can be switched off, directly reducing ground-level noise and air pollution.
	In Scandinavia, it is already a legal requirement that airports supply aircraft with electrical ground power. In fact, at Arlanda airport in Stockholm, APUs are allowed to be used for a maximum of only 10 minutes while the aircraft is on the ground, and ground staff are not allowed to approach the aircraft until the FEGP has been connected and the APU switched off. Furthermore, the airport includes the cost of FEGP usage in its landing charges, providing a valuable financial incentive. In Denmark, that practice has been taken a stage further: The FEGP units are connected to a central computer system and, if they are not used within three minutes of an aircraft's "on chocks" arrival time, a fine is automatically generated.
	Subsection (2) is designed to ensure that, once FEGP and preconditioned air have been provided at aircraft stands, aircraft are compelled to use them. In effect, that gives statutory force to the CAA's existing recommendations, which state:
	"Where FEGP units are provided on stands they should be used in preference to other forms of auxiliary power".
	In addition to reducing airside emissions, the use of FEGP is cost-effective for both the airport and the airline operators. A report from the United States by the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management (NESCAUM) indicated that airport operators there had found the payback period to be relatively short—less than two years. From the airlines' perspective, I think that we can take the fact that Ryanair, that most cost-conscious of airlines, insists on using FEGP wherever possible as evidence of it being the most economical option.
	Subsection (3) refers to airside vehicles, another important source of air pollutants. It requires that, by the 1 January 2009, larger airports with annual movements of over 50,000 passengers will have replaced or converted 50 per cent of their airside vehicle fleet to run on low carbon fuels.
	This initiative has already been championed at Heathrow by BAA and much of Heathrow's own vehicle fleet now runs on alternative, low-carbon fuels. The use of cleaner fuels can dramatically improve the air quality for those who live or work in or close to airports.
	In Committee, the Minister commented that,
	"airport operators do not have statutory powers enabling them to control emissions from airport vehicles".—[Official Report, 5/12/05; col. GC66.]
	It is high time that they did. This amendment provides for that opportunity. There are examples both of airports and of airline operators that are commendably already pursuing these initiatives. As with government thinking on penalty schemes, which we debated previously, we must use this opportunity to give those already leading the way the cover of legislation and those left behind a statutory obligation to adopt these best practices. The new clause provides two sensible measures with realistic timescales that offer a simple way of tackling the problem of aviation-related air pollution at a level that can make a tangible difference to people's lives. I beg to move.

Lord Davies of Oldham: moved Amendment No. 28:
	Page 12, line 33, at end insert—
	"( ) But an order under subsection (3) may not provide for subsections (2) to (4) of section 2 to come into force before 1st June 2012."
	On Question, amendment agreed to.
	[Amendment No. 29 not moved.]
	Schedule 1 [Policing of airports]: